Bullying in all its forms takes place in many workplace environments and Digital Tech organisations are no exception to this. Any form of bullying is totally unacceptable in any workplace and employers should do their upmost to take steps to tackle any activity construed as bullying. They should put in place preventative measures to ensure all employees are aware of what defines bullying and the steps they can take if it occurs. Employers and those responsible for talent management should take the subject of workplace bullying seriously as it can lead to talent sickness, low morale, poor productivity and high staff turnover.
In 2014 IDG Connect conducted research which showed that 75% of 650 IT professionals surveyed claimed to have been bullied at work, while 85% said they had seen others bullied.
Digital Tech talent often experiences or witnesses bullying in technology companies because of poor project management and unachievable deadlines set by managers. Other common situations that can be interpreted as bullying could be excessive monitoring and supervision (micromanagement) or constant criticism on trivial issues and in the worst cases talent can experience being ridiculed, humiliated, intimidated or even marginalised.
Putting in place policies on bullying and how it should be dealt with is something that should come from both senior management and human resources working together. In many Digital Tech start-ups, it is unfortunately the founders and leaders who often employ bullying tactics (Steve Jobs being a well know example of bullying in the workplace). Once acceptable policies have been established it is vital that all talent understands what these policies are and how any grievances will be handled. It is also important that there are clear definitions of what constitutes bullying because managers still need the ability to exercise acceptable disciplinary procedures for poor or unacceptable performance behaviour. This may sometimes be misunderstood by talent as bullying therefore any policies need to be clear and fully understood.
Any policies on bullying need to work in conjunction with other related policies on discrimination and DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) for example. This can be expanded to the recruitment and selection process too by implementing non biased decision making and applicant profiling (psychometric testing) along with asking relevant questions to identify potentially unacceptable behaviour in candidates. Using ATS or CRM tech hiring tools can greatly assist in managing this testing procedure during the selection process.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to deliver more efficient recruitment without bias is Hire Digital. A start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management ATS software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.